Cope's Bridge
George Cope was born in 1855 near West Chester, Pennsylvania, and spent most of his life in the Chester County area. He originally trained with German landscape artist Hermann Herzog, who lived in Philadelphia and was known for painting intimate and bucolic landscape scenes. Landscapes became a mainstay for Cope, especially scenes of the Chester County countryside, for which there was demand from his patrons in this region. An example of this is his painting of "Cope’s Bridge," a stone arch bridge built in 1807 spanning the East Branch of the Brandywine at Marshallton, Pennsylvania, replacing a wooden bridge from the late 18th century.
In this landscape scene, two of the three arches of the bridge are depicted, and on the right side of the bridge are the machine shops of E.T. Cope & Sons, which initially produced agricultural machinery, as well as castings for E.I. duPont’s mills in Wilmington, and later, car wheels and axels for the emerging Pennsylvania Railroad. As he did with many of his landscapes, Cope painted several versions of this subject.
The scene is set in summer-the trees are full of green foliage and a few flowers along the dirt road can be spotted. Although the foundry buildings to the right of the bridge are no longer there, Cope’s Bridge still carries Strasburg Road (Route 162) across the East Branch of the Brandywine River, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
